


no exit

by soundthebells (kosy)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Archivist!Sasha, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Light Angst, POV Second Person, Set Mid-S3, in which sasha goes very archivist very very fast, yes again what about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-23 12:00:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23711155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/soundthebells
Summary: There was a joy in the asking, though, wasn’t there?Wasn’t that why you chose this?Sasha James takes a different path.
Relationships: Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 20
Kudos: 97





	no exit

**Author's Note:**

> i love a sarchivist fix-it as much as the next guy, but here's my two cents: sasha james becomes a monster willingly. hope you all enjoy!

You wished this wasn’t the only way you could feel human anymore. Here, like this, curled up and tucked against his chest and pretending that the closeness, that grounding touch, could keep you safe from—anything, really. The monsters lurking around every corner. The other Avatars. The world. Yourself, whatever that meant these days. 

“Sasha,” Tim said, touching your cheek to get you to lift your head and look him in the eye. He thought he wanted that, the eye contact, but you knew how the silvery inhuman sheen unsettled him. It wasn’t worth romanticizing. It was unnatural, wrong, and you knew that down to the core of your being every time you looked in the mirror. You didn’t want to look for beauty in the wrongness. You had seen enough, so much more than you wanted to. And maybe if you kept telling yourself that, the eyes would stop opening up on the backs of your hands, on your forearms, your cheeks— “Are you okay?” he asked so softly, and it took everything in you not to laugh. What a question. You hadn’t thought it applied to you. Hadn’t considered _okay_ in months.

You answered as honestly as you could nonetheless; it seemed only fair. “I don’t know,” you mumbled, wishing you could hide your face. “Are you?” 

Tim huffed out a laugh, wry and dispassionate. “No. I don’t think anyone is at this point.” _Anyone_ being the Archives employees. Presumably, in the world outside, somebody somewhere is okay. Against all odds. But there was nothing to say to that, so you didn’t say anything at all, just let your forehead drop down into the crook of his neck where the sweat was beginning to dry on his skin. Felt the ache of your muscles. The messiness of it all was comforting in its familiarity even if not in its practice. His hands were hot, trailing up and down your spine. There were scars there. There were scars all over you—circular ones from the Corruption that matched his, but also the long clawmarks from the Distortion’s retaliation to being compelled, the slashes from Hunters’ blades, the burn scar from the Desolation that covers your entire left hand, the long, smooth lines where Nikola had traced a blade over your flesh as it chattered about peeling away your skin and wearing it. Bruises healed before they even got the chance to darken; shattered bone mended itself in seconds. But the wounds from the Entities always stayed. Constant reminders. You just wished you knew what they were meant to remind you of; you supposed you could ask, but it was the answers that were always difficult. 

There was a joy in the asking, though, wasn’t there? 

Wasn’t that why you chose this? 

You found the tape a few months after you started working in the Archives. You might have written it off as bullshit—very _elaborate_ bullshit, yes, but bullshit nonetheless—except that Gertrude Robinson went missing with the only clue to her whereabouts being a _massive goddamn bloodstain,_ traces of which were still detectable on your office carpet. Elias’ insistence on hiring you, specifically, despite your negligible (albeit still extant) experience in library science didn’t ease your suspicions. You should have asked more questions. Regardless, it was too late by the time you heard the tape. There didn’t even seem to be a point in trying to quit by then—even if Magnus could look into your mind, it hardly seemed prudent to show your hand so blatantly and give him a reason to, regardless of what Gertrude said on the recording. But you did investigate. Looked into some statements. Eventually even found your way into the tunnels (which, okay, _weird;_ a network of ominous, unnavigable, and somehow completely secret tunnels was enough to convince you of the validity of Gertrude’s claims, which were further corroborated when you found her bullet-riddled corpse surrounded by a bunch of old tapes, and then _Jurgen fucking Leitner)._

All told, a deeply strange collection of months. Perhaps the worst on-boarding process known to mankind.

You hadn’t liked the way Elias had watched you before—grinning and hungry, with a gleam in his eyes that was now intimately familiar—but now that you knew the reason, that you were to be an altar at which he prayed for the end of the world, you liked it even less. 

It took a while to get through the tapes by Gertrude’s body. By the time you really, truly understood what she meant by sacrifices, by prices that must be paid without hesitation, it was too late for you by far. 

(Your stomach turned at the thought of it when you finally figured it out. You found her statements after, well, _after—_ when she said sacrifices you had thought about Mike Crew, flinging himself off a clocktower and living with the scent of ozone crackling in the air wherever he went; you had thought about Prentiss and her wasp’s nest and the love of being made a home; you had thought about the Distortion who talked to you in a coffee shop and danced around its real story and talked about _Becoming_ and drove claws into your shoulders when you asked for more. When she said there was a price to be paid, you hadn’t thought about your friends. About Tim, or Jon, or Martin. You hadn’t thought about—about _slaying the fatted calf,_ about offering up the best of your people on the solstice so the sun will keep rising. 

You had thought about how the surest way to survive in the world of monsters was to become one. 

Well. Not just _one._

The strongest one.) 

It was a funny thing, really. You hadn’t even known how much power you had. In that first year and a half, you read as many statements as you could. You‘d wanted so badly to know about this world you’d been dropped into headfirst, and so you researched it—all the human creatures who had taken power where they could find it. People, but a little to the left. A strange sort of devotion to some greater concept or force that made them… less. Or more. You couldn’t decide. But you took all the information in. You still weren’t sure when that want for knowledge tipped into obsession. Into need.

You felt real fear during the Prentiss attack, however. Fear and fury. Tim was outside of the saferoom, Tim was in danger, Tim was grinning down at the tape recorder and didn’t see the corpse of a woman behind him, worm-riddled and horrible, and you would not let this world take any of them—you ran at him, knocked him out of the way. You ran to get help, to find Elias, because as much as you hated him, he probably knew the way out of this. You got separated. Ended up in Artifact Storage. 

Something was in there. Long-limbed and grayish and warped, flickerstalking toward you. You watched it, every movement, and were surprised by how regular your heart rate was. 

“I see you,” you’d said. _“I see you.”_ The thing froze, and you had almost laughed. “Tell me your story.” You hadn’t been afraid. Why weren’t you afraid? You recognized it from statements; you knew what it could do.

In a voice that was almost human: “No.” 

“Tell me.”

“No.” 

_“TELL ME!”_

_“NO—”_

It tore itself apart with a scream that shook the walls. Or maybe you tore it apart. The details, while fun to think about, didn’t particularly interest you. The rush of power, however, very much did. It was intoxicating, flooded through you so hard it almost knocked you over. Your skin was tingling, and you felt—not alive, exactly. But _vital._

You left Artifact Storage then. It had seemed so essential to be safe inside when you were hiding there, but now you were driven forward by an unstoppable need to witness. To experience. 

You got eaten by worms, yes. Felt every moment of screaming agony. It barely even registered. Your entire body was trembling, but not from exhaustion or terror or adrenaline. You even think you might have been smiling. You had seen everything that the Not-Them had been, taken it into yourself and consumed it and made it _yours._

There may have been a point when you were afraid of what you were becoming. Maybe you were still afraid. Hm. Always more questions. Not that the Eye is much interested in philosophy.

They all looked at you differently after that. You asked Jon why, and he said without hesitation that you seemed off somehow. Said that your joints moved oddly. Said that your fingers were too long and your eyes were too bright and you never slept or even left the Archives and you always seemed to be watching, somehow, even when your office door was shut. Said that you were quick-moving and eerily silent, except that your breath sounded like the whirring of tape recorders. 

Shuddered and stopped talking for a long moment. 

Said, more quietly, that you asked questions differently. Like there was no way anybody could stop themselves from giving you an answer. You nodded and thanked him. He wandered off toward the other two assistants on shaking legs. If anything, the worried glances increased after that. 

For your part, you started leaving the Archives more. Magnus didn’t stop you. He might have even looked proud, but you’d like to think there was a bit more fear in how he regarded you with every passing day. Good. You tracked down avatars as quickly as you could. You felt apart from them but at the same time very, very similar. The near-lust in Jude Perry’s eyes as she spoke about reckless, pointless destruction. The glee in the Distortion’s as it explained its own twisting nature. Even the begrudging respect and gratitude Michael Crew held for the Vast. 

You saw them, dizzyingly powerful, and you saw how they looked at you like they were trying to calculate how much of a danger you were. 

You never thought of yourself as dangerous before. Confident, sure. Smart, sure. You didn’t sell yourself short on that. But dangerous? No. Just—a woman. A woman who worked in academia and was often too tired to cook herself much more than pasta and sometimes went out for drinks after work and most of the time lived through days that were just okay and halfheartedly tried to read novels but had, somewhere, lost the joy for it that had urged her forward in childhood. But now— _now—_ you pulled the answers to everything out of people. You saw what little knowledge the world had seen fit to give you and you grabbed for more with both hands. And it worked. It worked. You had _so much more._

You used it for good, obviously. This newfound strength. All you’d ever wanted was for your people to be safe. And there were so many things out there that wanted to hurt them, people you had taken into yourself and consumed and made your own because you knew them wholly and therefore loved them.

Maybe they feared you. Maybe you feared yourself. 

The thing is, you knew you were being turned into a weapon. You just didn’t know what kind or for whom. And, honestly, you didn’t even know if you cared. 

You only felt human when you allowed yourself to act like you still were. When you allowed yourself to make mistakes. When you got drunk with your assistants enough to feel like you were falling out of your body or tripped on one of the steps up to your flat like you hadn’t known it was there. When you grabbed Tim by the hand and asked if he still wanted you, and he exhaled like he’d been punched and said _yes, Sasha, yes,_ and you didn’t let him get any further before kissing him hard, right there in the Archives, against one of the still-disorganized shelves. If you wanted to, you could have named every tensed muscle in his body, could have catalogued every bone he had ever broken and tell you how much it hurt, could have counted every firing nerve. You didn’t want to. You wanted to learn him the way people do, imperfectly and subjectively and painfully slowly. Even if it was only pretense. 

Later, there, feeling his sweat on your skin as you laid in his bed, you asked, “Do you love me?”

His jaw tensed as the surge of power hummed its way through him. “Yes,” he said immediately. That exhale again, sharp and shuddering. “Don’t do that.” 

“I’m sorry,” you said, uncertain and quiet. “I didn’t—” 

“It’s fine,” he muttered. “Just—” 

You waited. He didn’t finish the sentence. 

Distantly, you thought maybe you should hate yourself for this. For wanting more still. For not caring if it hurt. For liking it when people were afraid of you, just a bit. You at least tried to let your assistants keep their privacy, if only because that seemed like something you should have wanted for them. But still within you: that voice chanting _more, more. There’s more yet._ You’d thought that was a human urge for so long, your curiosity. 

You were a sacrifice you made for the world. It probably should have been more painful. 

There were more questions, buzzing so insistently you could feel them in your teeth. _Do you love me with my monstrosity or in spite of it? Do you love me because you are afraid of me, or is it because you aren’t?_

_If you could take it back, would you?_

For now, for him, you keep your eyes closed. All of your eyes. But only because you know that, soon, you will be able to open them once again. And Become. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! my tumblr is [@boneroutes](https://boneroutes.tumblr.com) if you want to talk there. drop a kudos or a comment if you feel like it, they keep me goin! <3


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